Occam's chainsaw

I loathe Michael Gove, but I have to say I am often grateful to him for clarifying what it is I do and don't believe. It isn't quite as simple as saying that 'Gove says it therefore it is wrong' (though that is an entirely reasonable starting point), it is more a question of the faux-reasonable and pseudo-intellectual style in which he pontificates provoking a stronger than usual reaction in me.

Take his recent performance as chair of the new commons 'Brexit' committee in which he "pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process." Clearly proud of his erudition he invoked the image of Occam's razor as the tool to be used in this sort of debate. And something about the posiness of that reference really got me thinking.

Occam's razor (named after the English Franciscan friar of that name) is the scientific principle that simpler hypotheses are preferable to more complex ones, and that therefore scientists should seek to reduce rather than increase complexity in their hypotheses. Michael Gove, clearly delighted by this idea, sought to apply it to the Brexit process, and why not? Throughout the referendum campaign he and his colleagues sought again and again to reduce the complexity of the arguments involved until they essentially came down to one sentence: "Take back control." Control over what was never clearly defined, and neither were the mechanisms by which this amorphous control was to be regained, nor the other consequences that might ensue. Occam's razor, see! Everything else could be left as vague and unspecified assertions about immigration, £350 million a week, new trading opportunities, return to pounds and ounces... anything you want really.

The thing is, of course, that that is not remotely how William of Occam intended his philosophical razor to be used. The point for him was that simpler hypotheses are better because they are MORE EASILY TESTABLE. Gove and his cronies have used their version of the razor to achieve the exact opposite. By airily dismissing any discussion of any of the intrinsic complexities of the questions in hand they have come up with sweeping generalisations that almost by definition can never be tested. When will we know that, as a country, we have 'taken back control?' The only way literally to achieve that would be to remove ourselves from any and all trans-national agreements (the UN, NATO, the International Criminal Court, the Commonwealth...), banish any and all multi-national companies from the UK and replace parliament with a system of rolling plebiscites, with everything from tax to street-lighting decided by referendum.

Is that what the Brexiteers were arguing for? Who knows. Maybe some were, but there is no way of knowing, and that's the point. Once a political aim becomes so simplistic and general that it is completely untestable then you can read into it whatever you want.

And it isn't just in the Brexit debate that this distorted Occam's razor has been weilded. Trump' campaign was all about simplistic, generalised and utterly untestable statements like "Drain the swamp" or "Make America great again." Even the apparently testable ones like "Build the wall" and "Lock her up" were really there as rallying cries rather than statements of intended policy, as Trump's rowing-back since the election has made clear.

And there is a wider seam of this sort of stuff that goes way beyond election politics. I happened to come across a Facebook argument between my brother (a mathematician and scientist) and various climate change deniers. My brother's posts were long (sometimes overlong, to be fair), thorough, nuanced and well researched. What he was often met with was memes. I happened across the same phenomenon in the bizarre world of the flat-earthers and wrote about it here.

But what Michael Gove, with his faux-philosophical intervention on the subject, prompted me to realise was that occam's razor remains a very useful image in these circumstances. A razor is a tool one uses with circumspect precision to remove hairy irrelevances to reveal the living essence of the person (or issue). Once a razor has been applied properly (and carefully) one can see clearly who or what one is dealing with, and so come to sensible and robust conclusion about them. What Gove, Farage, Trump, the flat-earthers and their like are wielding is what I would like to call occam's chainsaw. By recklessly destroying all complexity, relevant or irrelevant, from an issue and reducing it to puddle of minced flesh suitable to be formed into a meme they remove any possibility of any further debate. How are you supposed to argue with "take back control" or "make America great again"?

However the converse of this is also clear. Just as one should never, under any circumstances, use a chainsaw to shave with, so one should immediately reject any response to a complex issue which reduces it to a meme.

Or, to express that as a meme:

So, are Trump and Brexit the internet's fault then?

It goes without saying that there has been a troubling sea-change in the way politics is done (in the UK and the US anyway) over the last few months. The question is, why? Of course, populist demagoguery and the appeal to the lowest common denominator of mysogyny and racial and religious prejudice are hardly new, and neither is the phenomenon of post-truth politics . It's just that in the past it has taken conditions like the collapse of the Weimar Republic to bring them to the fore. And though there has been an economic downturn since the global financial crash, people aren't yet having to take a barrowload of banknotes to the shops to buy a pound of potatoes.

So why have the electorate turned their faces so vehemently against 'experts' and 'the establishment' that they are prepared to support people who are saying things that would not long ago have been unthinkable? And I don't just mean Trump's offensiveness towards women, the disabled, muslims and even PoWs, Johnson's racial slur on the President of the USA or Farage's Breaking Point poster. There is their utter disregard for normal standards of truth and honesty and their willingness to threaten political violence if they don't get their way (both Farage and Trump have explicitly warned of, and even encouraged, people taking to the streets if their agenda is frustrated). There is their willingness to talk in ludicrously broad terms of what they are going to achieve without the slightest attempt at formulating policies for doing so. Their willingness to whip their electorate up with promises they have absolutely no intention of delivering on.

Not so long ago these people (Trump, Farage, Johnson, Gove and others) would have become political pariahs for the way they have behaved - banished to the wastebin of political history like Nick Griffin, Jean-Marie le Pen or Ross Perot (all of whom would probably in 2016 be seen as rather conservative with a small c). So what has changed?

Is it ludicrous to suggest that the growth of the internet and social media holds part of the explanation? You see it used to be that the general electorate had an extremely unequal relationship with the political establishment. Political leaders were part of a secret world to which we, the electorate, had no real access and whose denizens knew far better than we did what was wrong with the world and how to put it right. You could protest of course, and many did, but you would never really know what went on in the corridors of power and never fully grasp the hugely complex levers of power that these people wielded.

The internet has changed all that. There is wikileaks of course, exposing the soiled underwear of that political establishment for all to see. But there's also Twitter and the like. Time was that political leaders pontificated on the BBC news and all you could do was shout at the television. Now political leaders have twitter accounts and your tweets are allowed exactly the same number of characters as theirs. It's like the scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz when the curtain gets pulled back to reveal the funny little man operating the machinery.

But the other thing that twitter does is allow (encourage even) strident and simplistic comments to be instantly disseminated with no real challenge. Time was, if a politician wanted to say any of the things Trump has put in his tweets they would have to do it either on TV or in parliament, and there they would be subject to more or less effective questioning and made to explain or justify their remarks. On twitter, that simply doesn't happen in the same way. Social media operates as a series of 'echo chambers' within which people generally hear repeated and amplified messages with which they are already inclined to agree. And if there is any voice of dissent it can quickly descend into a 'he said, she said' twitter storm that really doesn't hold anyone to account.

And it seems to me that this provides fertile ground for the dissemination of the sort of populist, demagogic politics we see from Trump and the Brexiteers (now there's a name for an apocalyptic Death Metal band...). And once a movement like that starts in social media world it can be very hard both to gauge accurately and to stop. The normal standards of decent political discourse simply don't apply in social media echo chambers, and anyone interjecting with rational, fact-based or expert counter-arguments can easily be dismissed (and/or personally attacked) as establishment stooges or even 'enemies of the people.' And the left-wing liberals would never set foot in these sort of social media echo chambers anyway (they have their own) so such a movement can grow virtually unchecked.

So what can be done?

I have always felt that, in the long term at least, an increase in the ability of people to communicate directly with each other must be a good thing. However recent events have shown beyond doubt that removing too rapidly the governing mechanism of respect for political establishments has been extremely dangerous. And now the only thing to do is somehow offer and disseminate an alternative discourse with which at least some of the people currently caught up in demagogic populism can engage. We won't do it by lecturing either (which sort of rules me out!) The liberal left needs to develop memes and (non-sarky) tweets and snappy one-liners about the empowerment of ordinary citizens and the benefits of cultural cross-pollination and the enormous benefits that liberal democracy has brought.

We need clever people and young people and people whose minds haven't atrophied or solidified around crass simplifications about immigration and scroungers. Thankfully that's just what we've got. But they need not to disappear into their own comfortably outraged echo chambers but get out there and start repairing the damage.

Good luck with that.